PythonCE-2.5-20071004 Released

This one is slightly better than my previous release, since it has been built from a known code base, which allows it to be rebuilt and expanded upon in the future.

If you are using a Pocket PC device you should also see that you have a new context sensitive popup menu on the main editor window. This provides cut/copy/paste options which you may find handy while developing short programs directly on the device.

This release also includes an optional patch which provides initial support for building with Visual Studio 2005 instead of Embedded Visual C v4. This patch needs refinement before it can be included in the main release, since it has essentially been hacked into the existing msevc.py file and lacks auto-detection of the location of your Visual Studio 2005 and Device SDK installations etc (what has happened to the batch files that used to be present in EVC???).

The main aim of this release is to start to increase the device compatibility of PythonCE. If anyone downloads this release I would appreciate feedback on whether it works on your device type or not. It should work on any Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone device running Windows Mobile 2003 or later.

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No that isn’t a stupid question. You should just be able to press the enter key on your keyboard (and/or push down the middle of the D-PAD).

I’m not sure what would be going on here. Would you be interested in running a little test app if I created one later this week to try to figure out what is going on here?

Python CE will only interpret commands if it can find a >>> prompt at the start of the current line. So if you accidentally delete this etc, you can get into a situation where commands are not accepted (i am working on a patch to resolve this particular issue).

If possible could you confirm that you havn’t deleted the >>> prompt displayed by Python CE, and test out if you can get Python to process the commands if you press the middle of the D-PAD (i.e. the arrow keys in between soft key buttons)? This would help me diagnose the issue.

It would also be handy if you could file a bug report on the PythonCE sourceforge website, so we could track this issue, and see if anyone else comes across it etc.

Hi, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to do this smartphone port of Python. I’ve installed it on my Motorola Q. However, I’m having a slight problem: the backspace key doesn’t work. In most programs on the Q, the back key acts as a backspace when you’re doing text input. However, in this one, it backs out of the application to the previous menu.

Sorry about about. The last release of PythonCE I made was an attempt to bring together a number of my patches that had “collected dust” for a couple of months.

I had a number of requests for a smartphone compatible build (and this re-sparked my interest in the project) so I quickly pushed out something and attempted to recover what I could from the patches I could find.

Quickly after that release I discovered the issue you mentioned. I obviously missed part of one of the patches I had made.

I am planning to make a new release in mid November and the good news is that this is one of many smartphone specific improvements which should be made available at that stage.

Other issues you will possibly discover while using a smartphone that have already been fixed for the upcomming release include:

the use of raw_input(’some prompt’) displays a dialog which can not be closed

If using a device with a numeric only keypad there is no (easy) way to enter a tab character and it’s a pain to enter some very common characters such as : [ ] ( ).

If you would like I could email you an “alpha” copy of this November release in it’s current state of development. It would be great to have someone independantly test some of it’s new features and provide feedback etc before it’s released for general distribution.

For those interested the bug reported by Hannu turned out to be related to a third party application that he had installed on his device. Further details can be found within the SourceForge issue tracker.

Thanks very much for the port. I’ve downloaded the lastest version on sourceforge and installed on my moto Q9h, but it seems to have the same problem with Mark Brents mentioned that the “back” key works incorrectly, and I really can’t wait to try phython on smartphone. would you please send me the ‘alpha’ version of the next release? thank you very much!

Hi to everybody.
I have installed this latest release of Python CE v.2.5 on Samsung i600 and it works just perfect! No issues with keyboard operation whatsoever. I need a help though: Is it possible to install Numeric package (built for version 2.4) in current release and if so how could I do this? Is NumPy package available for CE? In general, could anybody recommend brief self-containing description of building packages and their installing on Windows Mobile devices. I didn’t find any. If the developer(s) just didn’t have enough time to do this I would be glad to participate in documenting. Thank you for your great job!